Task force tries to save those who save too much

Hoarding, a growing problem, is a nuisance to neighbors and can create dangers in the home

HEATH FOSTE, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

By HEATH FOSTER, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 9:00 pm, Tuesday, October 29, 2002

Ruth Bell Thomas, who shows signs of being a hoarder, says her yard on Lake City Way is her way of speaking out against "North American Apparteid."
Photo: Scott Eklund/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Ruth Bell Thomas, who shows signs of being a hoarder, says her yard...

Ellen Allbrough sits in her bedroom recently in her West Seattle home. At one time her house was impassable with debris, and the home was cleared out about a year ago. But it still is a daily struggle for her to keep things clean.
Photo: Scott Eklund/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Ellen Allbrough sits in her bedroom recently in her West Seattle...

Ellen Allbrough's kitchen was piled with food containers, dirty dishes and empty cardboard boxes before a community police officer persuaded her to let volunteers clear away the debris.
Photo: /

Ellen Allbrough's kitchen was piled with food containers, dirty...

Allbrough tried to stay away during the dig-out because she said it was painful to watch two 40-yard Dumpsters being filled with her belongings. "It was very humiliating, but it had to be done."
Photo: /

Allbrough tried to stay away during the dig-out because she said it...

To Ruth Bell Thomas, the jumble of weathered wood, tattered shoes, totem poles and plastic children's furniture spilling into her yard on Lake City Way is protest art, a priceless collection memorializing her life and politics.

But look closer at this Seattle structure, and the classic signs of hoarding behavior are evident -- belongings piled so high inside that they have crushed her blinds against the windows, her back yard a crammed minefield of rickety construction materials, rusted canned goods and decaying cars.

Many of us grew up knowing of an elderly neighbor or eccentric relative similar to Thomas. Their out-of-control saving was usually explained away as an extreme reaction to the deprivations of the Great Depression or some other hardship.

But new research is finding that hoarding, a syndrome far more common than once believed, is most often the result of long-untreated mental illness that has nothing to do with the stock market crash of 1929. To deal with the city's toughest hoarding cases, a unique, multiagency task force has been created.

Often reclusive, hoarders spend years compulsively cramming their homes so full that stoves and toilets become unusable, and passage is limited to "trails" snaking through piles of newspapers, junk mail and fast food containers. It's usually not until rats take up residence and roofs begin to sag that city officials can gain access. And even then it can take years of legal maneuvers and up to $50,000 for a "dig-out" to remove tons of materials and make the homes safe again.

But because treatment for the syndrome is nearly non-existent here, the hoarding cycle often begins again once housing inspectors and public health workers leave. And neighbors are the ones who endure the eyesores and smells of homes that have become potential fire hazards.

"These people sink into this because they are isolated and without family, and they are often quietly dying without anyone on the outside caring," said Jordan Royer of the city's Department of Neighborhoods, who is heading the task force. "We are seeing it at every income level and every neighborhood."

The task force has assembled information on individuals who have demonstrated hoarding behavior that has caught the attention of neighbors and city officials. The names of the people identified in this story were taken from these and other city records.

In Victory Heights, 81-year-old John Hagaman continues hoarding bags of rotting meat, sour produce and canned goods in his overgrown back yard, despite years of neighborhood complaints about the smells. In West Seattle, sisters Elaine and Cheryl Anden can't be persuaded to leave a crammed home whose roof is caving in and toilet no longer flushes.

In the most tragic cases, hoarders' habits lead to their deaths. On lower Queen Anne last year, firefighters were unable to save 75-year-old Becky Leuckenotte when she dropped a cigarette in a condominium carpeted from wall to wall with a 3-foot-high pile of papers and plastic bags.

Hoarding cases now represent about a fifth of the 350 cases handled each year by the Geriatric Regional Assessment Team, a crisis intervention service for King County residents 60 and older, said Karen Kent, the program's clinical supervisor.

And only about a tenth of hoarders ever come to the attention of public officials, according to Randy Frost, a professor of psychology at Smith College who is widely considered the nation's leading researcher on compulsive hoarding. His work suggests that there are 350 hoarders per 100,000 people, or about 6,300 people suffering from the syndrome in King County alone.

Contrary to popular belief, those who faced extreme deprivation in the Great Depression or Holocaust generally don't become hoarders, he said. Hoarding is not keeping a bank of shelves in the garage well-stocked with canned goods for an emergency or having a collection of snow globes or African masks that has grown a little out of control.

By clinical definition, hoarders store things that are useless or of no value in volumes that interfere with their daily functioning, Frost said. Most typical are accumulations of newspapers, junk mail, soda cans and construction materials. But in recent years in King County, public officials have discovered collections of shampoo bottles, unworn clothing, chewed meat, urine and feces, TV dinner trays, stripped-down bicycles, plastic buckets of dirt, scrap metal, old boats, junk cars and animals both dead and alive.

Researchers are still studying what's at the root of the compulsion to save. They know the behavior generally begins in childhood or adolescence and that it tends to run in families. Hoarders are likely to be unmarried or divorced. Hoarding is often associated with obsessive compulsive disorder, but some hoarders suffer from chronic depression, attention deficit disorder, dementia or schizophrenia, research has shown.

Hoarders tend to worry intensely about throwing away something that they may need later. One patient of Frost's got apprehensive thinking about all the newspapers published in the world because it reminded her of all the information that was lost to her forever.

Although hoarders may acknowledge that their collections have gotten out of control, they seem to be powerless to whittle them down or stop collecting. And they come up with creative ways to justify their acquisitions and gather more things.

Lloyd Chambers, an 86-year-old man from whose University District home city officials recently removed 20,000 pounds of debris, mows the lawns of his neighbors for free as part of his search for treasures. Ruth Bell Thomas has written long letters to the Department of Design, Construction and Land Use explaining that her folk art collection is her way of speaking out against "North American Apartheid." ."

Greg Lamont, supervisor of housing and zoning inspections for DCLU, said hoarders are famous for telling inspectors to just come back in two weeks, and they'll have their messes cleaned up.

One retiree living on Northeast 130th Street provided DCLU with a minutely detailed plan for ridding his home of mounds of construction materials between August and November, even making allowances for how the shift in daylight saving time would affect his critical path. So far, he hasn't made a dent on his piles, Lamont said.

The inability to change habits ingrained over a lifetime explains why a single hoarding case can suck up hundreds of hours of time for public health workers, community service police officers, housing inspectors, fire marshals, city attorneys and mental health professionals and take years to resolve.

Neighbors often grow incredibly frustrated with how long it takes to deal with a problem home and how limited the resources are for helping hoarders improve.

Curtis Colvin, who's lived next door to Hagaman since 1977, remembers summers in which the smell of rotting food reminded him of dead game.

"He's a nice enough guy, but if I'd known there was a hoarder problem there, I never would have bought my house," Colvin said.

The hoarding task force was born after its members came together about 18 months ago to deal with the case of an elderly Green Lake couple whose accumulations had drawn so many rats that rodent bites were found in the ailing wife's oxygen tubes.

In cases where there's a documented community health risk, public health workers can sometimes persuade a judge to grant a search warrant that leads to an order for an immediate cleanup.

But in most cases, the city faces a lengthy process that begins with a DCLU or the public health department decreeing that a property is "unfit for human habitation." Next comes deadlines for the homeowners to repair or demolish the structure themselves; fines and administrative hearings for not doing so; and ultimately the filing of a civil suit against the hoarder.

When the city does finally win a judge's permission to bring in Dumpsters and organize a dig-out, it can be a painful experience for the hoarder.

"They are devastated," Lamont said. "They'll tell us that we have come in and stolen their stuff."

Dig-outs can cost as much as $50,000 because of the sheer volume of material that has to be removed and the damage homes have suffered during years of neglect. The city recently established a revolving fund to cover the cost of cleanups. And it places a lien against the property that will allow the city to recoup the costs when the house is ultimately sold.

The cases task force members are proudest of are those in which they have had success getting hoarders to have their homes cleaned up voluntarily. Seattle Community Police Officer Cheryl Brush visited newly widowed West Seattle retiree Ellen Allbrough again and again in the summer of 1999 in a slow effort to win her trust. The two women discovered that they were both Lincoln High School alums.

When Allbrough finally did show Brush her home, it was a disaster -- the kitchen floor was piled with empty food containers, dirty dishes and plastic bags, the living room an impassable jumble of lamps, clothes, furniture and trash, her bed barely distinguishable from the pile of discarded clothes around it.

An unassuming woman who had been beaten throughout her 32-year marriage by her husband, Allbrough was overwhelmed by the responsibility of handling her own finances and caring for her home alone. And she had no family to help her.

Allbrough allowed Brush to organize a partial dig-out of her living room and bedroom that September. Brush remembers being struck by finding a lovely rose colored rug beneath the debris and being struck that once Allbrough had been a vibrant woman with good taste.

But before long, trash began piling up again. This time Brush convinced Allbrough that the home had to be cleared out from top to bottom. In August of 2001, a team of volunteers from the Police Department and Conservation Corps filled two 40-yard Dumpsters with her debris. The team even installed new appliances, painted and hung curtains.

Allbrough said she tried to stay away during the dig-out because it was painful to watch her things being carted away.

"It was very, very humiliating, but it had to be done," she said.

On a visit to her home last week, more than a year since the dig-out, food boxes and dirty dishes had again buried her sink and her stove, and trash had accumulated around her bed. Allbrough said she has been distracted by a sick cat and a runaway dog in recent weeks and had let her housekeeping go.

"I know it's a mess," she said, hugging her dog, Radar. "I am trying to stay focused on the things that are important."

Brush said police will keep checking on Allbrough until she dies. "I won't let her fall into a crack," she said.

Hoarders inevitably return to their old habits without treatment, said Frost, who runs an anti-anxiety clinic for hoarders at Boston University and is working to refine a treatment protocol for the syndrome.

The therapy focuses on getting hoarders to recognize how many daily functions they can't carry out because of the clutter. In regularly scheduled excavation sessions, they are taught to organize their possessions into piles of things that will either be put away, given away or discarded. The project might be as small as clearing off a bedside table. It's important that the hoarder decides the fate of every object.

His therapy is offered at just a few clinics in the country, and with the intense budget shortfalls that mental health services in this region face, there's little chance intensive treatment will be offered here soon.

Yet, Frost said he is hopeful that less expensive, community-based approaches -- such as clutter workshops and support groups such as Messies Anonymous -- that have had success can be refined and expanded.

Said Kent of the Geriatric Regional Assessment Team: "Sometimes the best we can do for hoarders is to make their homes safe."